Civil War Journal: The Legacies

By William C. Davis, Brian C. Pohanka and Don Troiani

Based on the History Channel documentary series. How the Civil War sparked profound changes in slavery, immigration, women’s roles, journalism, and more.

“In many arenas, the Civil War changed things both in military and civilian life,” William C. Davis observes. “The roles in society of women and minorities were altered drastically. Advancements in medicine and technology exerted a profound impact on the future. Industry burgeoned. The reporting of news entered the modern era with the photograph. Culture changed as the complexion of Americans evolved and as war’s wounds imposed lasting divisions upon our society. It ensured at once that future wars would be more terrible, and yet we would be equipped to cope with that terror to come. These are the legacies of the war covered in this volume.”

Civil War Journal: The Legacies is the third volume of a three-volume treatment of the Civil War developed from the popular History Channel series Civil War Journal. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and newspaper reports, these volumes focus on seldom-told stories of people, places, and events that bring to life the heroic intensity of the Civil War. They portray the human side of the conflict that is frequently overlooked in recounting troop movements and engagements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 30, 1998
• ISBN: 9781418559045

Book preview

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CIVIL WAR JOURNAL™

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The Legacies

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CIVIL WAR JOURNAL™

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The Legacies

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edited by

WILLIAM C. DAVIS,

BRIAN C. POHANKA

AND DON TROIANI

RUTLEDGE HILL PRESS®

Nashville, Tennessee

Text copyright © 1999 by A&E Television Networks. Captions, additional material, and compilation copyright © 1999 by Rutledge Hill Press®, Inc.

Civil War Journal is a trademark of A&E Television Networks.

The History Channel is a trademark of A&E Television Networks and is registered in the United States and other countries.

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Rutledge Hill Press® , 211 Seventh Avenue North, Nashville, Tennessee 37219. Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Co., Ltd., 34 Nixon Road, Bolton, Ontario L7E 1W2. Distributed in Australia by The Five Mile Press, 22 Summit Road, Noble Park, Victoria 3174. Distributed in New Zealand by Tandem Press, 2 Rugby Road, Birkenhead, Auckland 10. Distributed in the United Kingdom by Verulam Publishing, Ltd., 152a Park Street Lane, Park Street, St. Albans, Hertfordshire AL2 2AU.

Typography by Compass Communications, Inc., Nashville, Tennessee.

Illustration Credits constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Civil War journal / edited by William C. Davis, Brian C. Pohanka, and Don Troiani.

        p. cm.

     Fifty-two edited scripts from the television program Civil War journal.

     Includes bibliographical references and index.

     Contents: [2] The Legacies

     ISBN 1-55853-439-3

     1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Davis, William C.,

     1946– . II. Pohanka, Brian C., 1955– . III. Troiani, Don. IV. Civil

     War journal (Television program)

     E468.C6247   1997

     973.7'8—dc21

97-6861

CIP

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 — 04 03 02 01 00 99

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Contributors

1. Slavery

2. Divided Families

3. First Ladies, North and South

4. Civilians in the War

5. Women at War

6. Zouaves!

7. Immigrants and the War

8. Reporting the War

9. Mathew B. Brady

10. Alexander Gardner

11. The Spies’ War

12. Banners of Glory

13. Artillery

14. Trains at War

15. Battlefield Medicine

16. Prison Camps

17. Arlington

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Preface

THE LEGACIES OF the Civil War are profound and continue to affect Americans today. The economic, social, and political changes due to the abolition of slavery are obvious examples, but as the chapters in this book indicate, the war changed how Americans think and go about their business in many ways. The four bloody years in the 1860s were a watershed for all American people.

The war, for instance, pushed medical science beyond old limits. Doctors developed and refined techniques that would not have been attempted if they had not been challenged. The details are frequently gruesome, but the Civil War changed medicine forever.

The Civil War was the first conflict to be thoroughly photographed, allowing citizens to see the atrocities of war first hand. Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner developed the concept of photojournalism and, at the same time, changed the way Americans thought about war. The relationship between the press and the government and the issue of censorship was first defined during the war, establishing the basis for future reporting and photojournalism.

Similarly, there were few principles of espionage before the Civil War. Spies tended to be amateurs, and their intelligence of limited value. By war’s end America had a tradition of effective information gathering, and established the foundations for future sophistication in clandestine warfare.

Railroads were just approaching maturity in 1860. The war gave trains an opportunity to prove their effectiveness at determining the outcome of many battles and ultimately influencing the course of the war itself.

The Civil War divided families and the nation, opened a door to greater freedom and enlarged roles for all women, provided a means by which immigrants could forge a strong allegiance to their new homeland, and left a legacy of examples of bravery, dedication, and patriotism that still inspire us.

The topics selected for this book are those chosen for the History Channel’s Civil War Journal. This is the third volume in the three-volume series; the first two discuss The Leaders and The Battles of the Civil War. The text for each chapter was taken from the script for the corresponding episode of the television series. An effort was made to maintain the voice, nuance, and inflection conveyed by the many experts who made this a distinctive body of work. Their words are set off in the text with superscript bullets; open bullets (•) mark the beginning of a speaker’s words and solid bullets (•) indicate the conclusion. Attribution is indicated by initials in the left margin, and those initials are indentified on the first page of each chapter.

Unlike the two earlier volumes, however, in which the subject matter was well suited to the characteristics of effective television, there is a greater departure from the scripts in this volume because television does not handle concepts as effectively as it does stories. Nevertheless, we have sought to be true to the original script while providing a text that effectively makes use of the characteristics of effective printed communication.

An understanding of the Civil War is an important part of understanding who we are as Americans. It is our purpose to contribute to that understanding.

WILLIAM C. DAVIS

BRIAN C. POHANKA

DON TROIANI

Acknowledgments

MANY PEOPLE were involved in the creation of this book. Each chapter started with a script for the television episode. The writers and producers of each episode are Martin Gillam (Slavery and Immigrants and the War), Linda Fuller (Divided Families and The Spies’ War), Laura Verklan (First Ladies, North and South and Women at War), Greg Goldman (Civilians in the War, Alexander Gardner, and Trains at War), Richard Jones (Zouaves!),

Noah Morowitz (Reporting the War), Authur Drooker (Mathew B. Brady and Arlington), Rob Kirk (Banners of Glory), Rob Lihani (Artillery), Dennie Gordon (Battlefield Medicine), and Kellie Flanagan (Prison Camps). The text was adapted for print by Clint Johnson, Ed Curtis, and Lawrence M. Stone. The captions were written by Milton Bagby, Dana B. Shoaf, and Heidi Campbell-Shoaf and edited by Alice Ewing. Devereaux Cannon consulted on Banners of Glory.

Of course an adaptation such as this would not have been possible without the assistance of Craig Haffner and Donna Lusitana of Greystone Communications. Similarly, Thomas Heymann and Jonathan Paisner of A&E Television Networks have been invaluable in their guidance.

A book such as this is dependent on the willingness of archives, museums, historical societies, universities, and private collectors to allow us access to their collections for photographs. We cannot be profuse enough in our thanks to the many people and institutions involved. The list of photograph credits appears on pages 498 and following. Of particular help has been Martin Baldessari, JoAnna McDonald, Jennifer Greenstein, and Ralph Eubanks and Blaine Marshall of the Library of Congress.

We have enjoyed working with the editors of Rutledge Hill Press in the production of this volume.

The Contributors

ONE OF the distinctive elements of Civil War Journal: The Legacies is the authority conveyed by the sixty-five scholars, historians, curators, and descendants who infused each topic with something of themselves, bringing the leaders alive for a television audience. Their comments have been marked throughout the text, with an open superscript bullet (º) indicating the beginning and a solid superscript bullet (•) marking the conclusion of direct quotations from the television script. Initials appear in the left margin designating attribution. Each chapter’s opening page includes a list in the lower right hand corner of the experts whose voices can be heard on the pages that follow. Their names are reproduced here in two lists, one arranged by last name and another by initials (page xii).

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CIVIL WAR JOURNAL™

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The Legacies

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SLAVERY

The ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, OF ALL OF the legacies of the American Civil War, is the most far-reaching and perhaps the most difficult to address objectively. For those whose ancestors were slaves, the issue has a heightened emotional dimension because their forebears suffered under an economic and social system that viewed and treated them as property rather than people. For those whose ancestors were not slaves, the issue is less personal and more difficult to under-stand in human terms. As well as being an emotional issue, the abolition of slavery also involved political, economic, and moral aspects.

Politically, in mid-nineteenth-century America abolition was at the heart of the battle over the right of individual states to determine their own destiny. It was this aspect of abolition that led to the Civil War. Most Northern soldiers did not go to battle to free the slaves in the South, but to put down the insurrection among the rebelling states and restore the Union. Likewise, most Southern soldiers did not take up arms to preserve the institution of slavery, but to continue the fight for the freedom to choose their own destiny begun in the American Revolution. In 1776 the American colonies revolted against a system of government in which they had no representation but which assessed taxes and made laws concerning matters about which it had no firsthand knowledge. In 1861 the South rose up against a government that it believed was on the verge of destroying its way of life, which included the enslavement of more than one-third of the region’s population.

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Although Congress outlawed the slave trade in 1808, the law was poorly enforced and African slaves continued to be brought into the United States until the start of the Civil War. Slavery was not abolished in Puerto Rico until 1873, in Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil until 1888. Drawn in the 1870s, the illustrations above show typical slave trading transactions. The lucrative slave trade encouraged African rulers to sell Africans from other tribes whom they captured as prisoners of war in return for European-made cloth, guns, and iron (above left). From the 1500s until the 1800s European slave traders brought up to 10 million slaves to North and South America from Africa’s west coast between Senegal and Angola. About one-half million slaves came to the United States and Canada. Before making a purchase, the traders inspected their potential merchandise as they would livestock (above right). After the Civil War, a former slave, when asked about his propensity for stealing from his master, replied, White folks stole de niggers, . . . jes’ like you’d go get a drove of horses and sell ‘em.

Economically, slavery was the necessary ingredient that fueled the agrarian way of life in the South through a dependence on cash crops such as rice, tobacco, and cotton. In 1860 cotton accounted for an astounding 57 percent of the value of all American exports. The South, however, lacked the kind of industrial infrastructure that was booming in the North. Nevertheless, the South had confidence that just as it had succeeded in bartering cotton for goods and luxuries from the Continent for the first half of the 1800s, it would easily continue to do so as an independent country in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Of course, for the Southern cotton empire to succeed, it had to maintain its monopoly on European markets and it had to retain an enslaved labor force. Abolition threatened to destroy the economic strength of the South, wrecking this agrarian way of life and promoting the cultivation of cotton in Egypt and India to which Europe would turn when American cotton disappeared from its market.

Morally, slavery debased an entire people and cataloged them as property to be bought and sold like most farm animals, with no regard for familial ties. Except for abolitionists, most free persons in the mid-nineteenth century did not view slavery in the same moral terms as people do at the turn of the twenty-first century. Those who were not abolitionists usually accepted the legal determination that slaves were property— not human beings—and because they were property their owners could do what they wanted with them. Even some free blacks were slave owners and evidently saw nothing morally wrong with it. Whether a slave owner was benevolent toward his slaves or treated them harshly, such types of slave owners viewed human beings as property, a legal conclusion that had tragic moral consequences. The abolition of slavery was a moral issue, but it took abolitionists who were regarded as fanatics at the time to make this point.

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Unimaginable horrors cascaded on the captive Africans as they were forced from their homeland and placed aboard ships for the Middle Passage across the Atlantic to a U.S. port. Shackled with heavy chains for much of the trip, the miserable slaves often lay for days in their own excrement and vomit. When they were released for periods of exercise, some desperately ended their terror by leaping to their deaths in the ocean. This nineteenth-century illustration served to instruct the captain of a slave ship how best to use his storage space to maximize his cargo load and profit.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was one of the few Western countries still practicing slavery. Britain, France, Spain, and other countries outlawed slave trading in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The legal prohibition of slavery itself occurred in Britain in the 1830s, in France in the 1840s, in Portugal in 1858—although it did not fully take effect 1858—although it did not fully take effect until 1878— and in Holland in 1863. At the time of the Civil War, slavery was still actively practiced only in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil. In the American South, the white community vowed to do anything necessary to preserve slavery, even if it meant civil war.

For decades the South had heard northern politicians warn that slavery must end one day. In 1855 Abraham Lincoln, an obscure congressman from Illinois, pronounced: As a nation we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal except Negroes. Not long afterward, in a senatorial race, Lincoln began a traveling series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas over the future of slavery in the new territories.

While those in power debated the future for politically powerless slaves, the slaves in the South knew exactly what they wanted. Anthony Bingham, one of these slaves, confessed, I never saw the day since I knew anything that I didn’t want to be free.

The first slaves had arrived in America in 1619 when a Dutch ship docked at the Jamestown, Virginia, colony with twenty blacks for sale. The colonists, feeling overworked carving out a living in the new frontier, quickly purchased the men and readily accepted the institution of slavery.

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A broadside (above) advertising a slave auction aboard ship assures potential buyers that the cargo is free of smallpox. Willis Cofer, a former slave, said that bidding at such auctions would start at two hundred fifty dollars for a young, strong man. A good young breedin’ ‘oman brung two thousand dollars easy, ‘cause de marsters wanted . . . plenty of strong healthy chillun. Cyarpenters and bricklayers and blacksmiths brung . . . from three thousand to five thousand dollars. . . . A good field hand brung ‘bout two hundred dollars.

An 1861 engraving (below) from Harper’s Weekly, a Northern periodical, linked the Southern rebellion with slavery by depicting an auction beneath the first national banner of the Confederacy.

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Within a few decades the practice of owning human beings was accepted by all thirteen colonies. Slaves were trained to work on farms, in factories, and as craftsmen, such as blacksmiths and carpenters. Skilled slaves built the houses of George Washington at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Few whites found anything wrong with a custom that many believed was sanctioned by the Bible.

ºIn fact, when the nation was founded in 1776, freedom for the slaves was crossed out of the Declaration of Independence. When the federal government was created in 1789, slavery was sanctioned by the Constitution• through the three-fifths compromise, which enumerated three-fifths of a state’s slave population for purposes of representation and taxation.

Only in the 1820s and 1830s did slavery begin to disappear in the northern states, not because of moral considerations, but rather economics. Instead of using African-born slaves in the region’s rapidly emerging factory-based economy, the North drew on the vast numbers of European immigrants whose cultural heritage was similar to the existing population’s and whose assimilation was impeded only by language. To be sure, immigrants were paid such low wages that they were little more than slaves, but they were free to marry, free to read, free to associate with whom they wanted, and once they had paid their debts to the company store, free to move on to a better life.

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Most of the blacks in the South did not have the freedom to move. The southern economy, based on crops that were exchanged for manufactured goods from the North and Europe, needed them. ºRemove what was believed to be WCD cheap labor—like slaves—from the South, and the cotton industry and other agricultural commerce might very likely have collapsed.•

Although slavery had been accepted as a fact of life in the colonies, by the beginning of the nineteenth century even some citizens in the South had begun to question its value. In fact, there were more slaves in the South at one point in the late 1790s than there was work for them to do on the farms and plantations. Thus many slave owners freed their slaves because owning and caring for them had become unproductive. Ultimately, laws were enacted to protect elderly slaves from being turned off the plantations when they could no longer work in the fields.

Some slaves bought their freedom with wages they had earned while hired out to others, a practice ex ploited by many slave owners who needed ready cash between crop sales. An owner kept most of the slave’s wages but gave him a portion as an incentive to do good work. At one point in the early 1790s, more than 10 percent of the South’s black population was free; most of these lived in the Upper South where cotton was no longer grown.

Some free blacks even purchased slaves themselves to help them operate their own farms, demonstrating how widely accepted slavery was as a social institution.

Before being brought to the auction block, slaves were herded into holding cells or pens, like this one of the Alexandria, Virginia, firm of Price, Birch and Company. One slave remembered that the pens were covered with cloth sheets, a tactic that stimulated buyer anticipation by preventing them from seeing the stock too soon. At the appointed time, an overseer would lift the curtain, and the bidders would begin crowding around the pen, eyeing their potential purchases. Such dank cells were often the last places slaves saw family members before they were sold to different owners and transported to various parts of the country.

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In 1793 schoolteacher Eli Whitney helped to revive the languishing institution of slavery in the South by making it essential to the southern economy and southern existence.

While tutoring some children on a Georgia plantation, Whitney noticed a number of slaves laboriously picking out the seeds from the cotton bolls so the bolls could be baled and shipped for final processing. He re-turned home to New Haven, Connecticut, and within months developed and refined a machine he called a cotton engine through which raw cotton was deseeded. What had once been a time-consuming task that significantly limited the availability of southern cotton was streamlined. Slaves who had spent days deseeding cotton could return to planting, cultivating, and harvesting the crop.

Out of concern for their economic investment, most owners attempted to provide crude but adequate housing for their slaves. Such living quarters were often similar to the slave cabins pictured at right, usually sixteen by eighteen feet with dirt or plank floors and with fireplaces used for both cooking and heating. Census and plantation records from the antebellum era indicated that the most common living arrangement in such cabins was a single-family unit of five to six people. In some instances, much more crowded conditions existed, although southern agricultural magazines and most planters decried overcrowding as unhealthy and the cause of immorality between the sexes. Small slave children had plenty of playmates in the quarter.

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The sudden new importance of slaves can be seen in the accelerated levels of cotton production between 1790 and 1810. In 1790 the South produced only a few thousand bales of cotton; twenty years later production had increased to nearly a quarter million bales. By 1860 several million bales of cotton were sold to the North and abroad, representing approximately 57 percent of the value of all American exports. As one southern politician boasted, in the South cotton was king.

In 1808 the international slave trade was abolished, but if any slaves had hoped that the need for their labor would diminish, such hope disappeared with the appearance of Whitney’s cotton gin. By the 1850s there were nearly four million slaves in the South, comprising one-third of the southern population. In portions of Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, and Mississippi, slaves vastly outnumbered the free population. Slavery, which had almost ebbed, took off like a great flood, even creating a forced migration of slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South, where richer land could be found.

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Despite the overall desperate nature of human slavery, slaves, particularly those on large plantations, often recognized that their master’s financial well-being rested upon their efforts in planting, nurturing, and harvesting the cash crop. In turn, the slaves were sometimes able to demand an infrequent day off or extra food and clothing from their owners. One historian has described this as a system whereby slaves could force owners to use positive inducements rather than harsh discipline in return for work. A South Carolina planter named James Henry Hammond, for example, attempted to limit the amount of time his slaves had off for Christmas. He wrote in his diary, however, that he was persuaded out of my decision by the Negroes. This image of plantation slave quarters on Port Royal Island, South Carolina, was photographed by Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862.

While most southerners believed slavery was necessary for the region’s economic survival, many understood that slavery was also a convenient social tool.

ºEven if the South had decided that it could afford to end slavery for economic reasons, the southerners were concerned with how they would control the large number of African Americans once they had their freedom.•

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The owners’ control of their slaves went beyond just sending the black workers into the fields at dawn and making sure they were in their cabins at night. Slaves could not travel, marry, or even learn to read without their owner’s permission. Owners were restricted in what they could do with their slaves. ºA number of states passed laws against educating slaves because reading stimulated ideas, and ideas ultimately led to demands for changes in the social structure. Ignorance became a powerful weapon in the hands of a southern aristocracy that needed to subjugate a lower class.

ºControl was maintained through discipline, which could be extreme, but whipping was more the exception than the rule. Harsh punishment was reserved for recalcitrant slaves and perpetual runaways. ºMasters did not go out into the fields late in the afternoon and beat their slaves. They could ill afford to damage the people who were producing their crops and generating their income.• ºDaily violence on the plantations might include something as common as cuffing slaves when they failed to do the work they were supposed to do or for some minor offense such as not smiling. Some owners, however, turned violent when they were annoyed or tired or drunk.•

Violence was prevalent early, during slavery’s introduction into the colonies, when the white masters sometimes viewed the Africans as subhuman. As the institution grew more familiar over the decades, most owners began to think of the slaves as their people, childlike creatures who needed to be fed, clothed, and housed in exchange for labor. There was little cruelty, and a few plantation owners even allowed their slaves to organize their own system of justice and punishment to deal with minor offenses against the master or fellow slaves.

The greatest cruelty slaves faced was not the whip but the breakup of slave families. Slaves were always afraid of being sold, and ºapproximately one-third of slave families were broken up by sale. It could happen at any time. The field hands might return to their cabins one night and discover that their owner had died and his property had to be settled through a sale. • That property of course included all the slaves owned by the estate. If the owner was behind in his taxes or if the farm was heavily in debt, slaves were assets that could be liquidated easily to bring in cash.

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Before the war, Savannah, Georgia, was a city that owed its prosperity to cotton, and cotton brought with it slavery. In 1848 forty-one percent of Savannah’s population were slaves and the city became a target for those who wanted to report on the mistreatment of African Americans. One ardent abolitionist, reporting on an 1859 slave auction, said, The Negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed: those slave-drivers pushing the women about, pulling their lips apart to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, and, oh! Hardest, cruelest of all, tearing apart parents and children, brother from brother, sister from sister, loving heart from loving heart. The picture at right is of the slave cabins at the Hermitage Plantation in Savannah where slaves were raised to sell at the market.

Such sales, however, created horrific scenes. My mother, recalled a young slave, Cy Henson, half distracted, fell at the owner’s feet and clung to his knees, entreating him to buy her baby as well as herself. He kicked her away.

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As Union soldiers began to move into Southern territory, they encountered large groups of slaves like the one pictured above on a plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina. Although many Northern troops never acknowledged blacks as their equals, their firsthand look at the conditions of human servitude caused them to hate the system as an evil affecting all Americans. In an 1862 letter to his wife written from Tennessee, Indiana soldier Walter Gresham penned that while he was no abolitionist, the more he saw of slavery in all its enormity the more he became convinced that it was a curse to . . . [the] country.

Slaves were frequently the most valuable assets on a farm, their value driven up by the outlawing of the slave trade. A strong farm hand could fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars in the 1850s. A healthy slave girl might bring five thousand dollars based on her ability to bear children, who would inherit her slave status, thus perpetuating the labor force.

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This led to ºone of the many tragedies and abuses of slavery: African-American women could not protect themselves. They could not look to their husbands, their brothers, or their fathers for protection either. Any white man felt it was his right to accost a slave woman if he chose to. •

Owners often did not ponder the morality of owning other people. Most argued that slavery benefited the slave. They believed that taking the blacks out of the African jungle and transporting them to the South had given them a much better life by working in the cotton fields than by continually fighting each other in tribal wars. ºIt was a very paternalistic attitude based on the belief of the inferiority of the slaves.• In the owners’ view, without someone to provide food and shelter in exchange for labor, the slaves would be lost in the world.

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Racial lines were drawn and supported by the science of the day. Negroes consume less oxygen than the white, thus it is a blessing to Negroes to have persons in authority set over them to take care of them, wrote Dr. Samuel Cartwright of Louisiana University, a scientist in the 1850s who theorized that blacks had different circulatory and nervous systems from whites. From examining the facial features of slaves, he deduced they were more closely related to monkeys rather than being in the same species as Caucasians.

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Beginning in the 1830s, the abolitionist movement, spearheaded by people like William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Dwight Weld, grew into an organized crusade aimed at the immediate and universal emancipation of all slaves. Although actual membership in abolitionist societies never amounted to more than a handful of the northern public, there is little doubt that abolitionists did serve to keep the issue of slavery topical and controversial throughout the antebellum period. This beseeching and poignant 1837 poster is just one example of how abolitionists attempted to publicize the plight of American slaves.

As proof that slaves were happy with their lot, owners frequently cited the fact that they were always singing. What the masters did not know was that those songs, frequently sung in tribal languages, were sometimes coded to mean something only to other slaves. ºThere were many messages in the songs. In some instances they made fun of the slave owner. In other instances they sang songs about freedom. Had the owner listened closely enough, he would have understood that his slaves were not at all happy.•

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For example, one slave song was titled Follow the Drinking Gourd, a slow, melodic song that mentioned rivers and men who will carry you to freedom. While owners may have thought the steady beat of the song helped the slaves hoe the cotton better, they must have overlooked the lyrics. The drinking gourd referred to the Big Dipper constellation, which has at its tip the North Star. The song told escaping slaves how to find their way north and suggested they look for men along the big rivers, like the Ohio, who would row them across to freedom.

Far from always being happy, slaves found numerous ways to express their unhappiness with their owners whenever work demands were unreasonable or members of their community were sold. ºThey intentionally broke tools,• for instance, by slamming hoes into the ground and breaking their handles. They would injure mules to keep from plowing and engage in other work slowdowns. ºSome more daring slaves might grind up glass and put it in their owner’s food.•

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The most dangerous course for both slave and master was armed resistance. The first instances occurred within a couple of decades of the initial importation of slaves. Violent outbreaks happened in nearly all the colonies, with the largest in the eighteenth century being the Stono Revolt in 1739 near Charleston, South Carolina. Several dozen slaves banded together and killed a number of whites before a vigilante force captured and executed them.

Nearly one hundred years later, in August 1831, a much larger slave revolt took place, sending waves of fear throughout the white South. Ironically, it occurred within forty-five miles of Jamestown, Virginia, the site where slavery was introduced into the New World. The revolt was led by a slave named Nat Turner, a self-educated slave preacher who became convinced after witnessing a solar eclipse that the Lord had spoken directly to him with orders to slay his enemies in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ. Turner and several followers hacked his master’s family to death, starting a two-day, plantation-to-plantation killing spree that recruited seventy slaves into joining the violence. ºTurner seemed to have had no particular plan in mind. The rampage was, if anything, a spontaneous outburst of rage and resistance against remaining a slave any longer. •

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The extreme violence of Nat Turner’s revolt enraged those who had to quell it. ºTurner’s master had been decapitated, and his wife’s throat had been cut. The small band of slaves moved from home to home throughout the county, butchering the whites as they went. In all, fifty-nine whites were killed. •

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Master and slave frequently battled each other over religious autonomy on the plantations. Although this image depicts slaves praying with a black minister in a black church, many owners forbade their slaves to conduct their own church services. Instead, they had to attend meetings conducted by white preachers who told their audiences, said Alice Sewell, to be good servants, and to help Old Marse and Old Miss. After the approved ceremony, where the slaves sat in a balcony or other segregated part of the church, they might have their own secretive prayer meeting in a cabin where they would set fer hours . . . an’ praise de Lord.

ºTurner and the slaves who followed him were very quickly tracked down. Almost all the participants were later tried and executed, but this revolt generated fear throughout the entire South.• Slave owners hundreds of miles away who learned of the revolt through newspaper accounts began to look at their slaves warily.

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•Owners felt they could not trust their slaves because they knew they had imposed a false happiness on them. On one hand, the owners appreciated the sense of diffidence in their slaves; on the other hand, they were afraid of the mask. •

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In addition to the fear that their slaves would revolt, slave owners also feared that northern politicians were planning a political revolt in the halls of Congress. They believed the Yankees were plotting to end slavery and with it the southern way of life.

WHILE THE South based its economy on plantation farming and imported almost all manufactured goods from the North or overseas, the North built its wealth in cities and on manufactured foods made in its own factories. Yankees were able to oppose slavery because they did not need slavery, but most northerners were not anxious to embrace blacks as equals. The North had abolished slavery, not racism. By the 1850s there were 325,000 free blacks living in the North, but many of the 20 million white northerners would have preferred that they lived elsewhere. ºThere was much feeling among Americans, North and South, that if the slaves should be free, they could not live in a society designed by and for white Americans. •

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The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 with a generous grant from Congress and the goal of sending freed slaves back to Africa. Through its efforts, fifteen thousand black Americans, many of whom had been born in this country, were persuaded to move to West Africa and settle a new colony called Liberia. ºColonization was a way to salve one’s conscience; the slaves could be sent back to the continent from which they had come and the situation among the states would be settled.• The American colony in Liberia eventually collapsed due to disease and economic problems, but Liberia itself became an independent country in 1848.

Slaves young and old gather for a portrait in front of their Virginia quarters. The peaceful nature of the image belies the havoc that slavery brought to families. In addition to the strains caused by forced breeding and constant work, slave owners could on a whim tear apart family units and marriage unions by selling or renting children or a husband or wife to a distant plantation. This potential threat was foreshadowed by the owners’ amending their properties’ marriage vows to end with the ominous phrase, ‘till death or distance do us part.

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Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, a machine that quickly and efficiently separated seeds from cotton bolls, allowed southern cotton planters to increase the size and profitability of their cotton crops. This led to an increasing demand for slave labor. The Florida field hands above engaged in the backbreaking work of manually harvesting cotton were photographed after the war. Census records from 1790 indicate that approximately 700,000 slaves lived in the United States. By 1810, after the advent of the cotton gin, this figure had surged to 1.2 million. Northerners as well as southerners benefited from the increase in slave labor because the bountiful crops produced in the South’s cotton fields made many New England textile mill owners very wealthy.

While concerned wealthy northerners were shipping blacks overseas, the government in Washington was struggling with what to do about blacks and slavery within the country. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves were not citizens. The case concerned a slave whose owner, an army surgeon, had taken him into the western territories and free states where slavery was not legally recognized. The slave’s name was Dred Scott, and he believed that his being within the borders of these free states made him a free man, and so he sued for his freedom. There was little surprise that the Court denied Scott’s freedom, but the grounds for the decision shocked most northern sensibilities.

Eighty-year-old Chief Justice Roger Taney, himself a former slave owner, delivered the Court’s opinion. They are beings of inferior order. So far inferior they have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, he wrote. As an inferior being, Scott could not be a citizen nor did he have the right to sue. Furthermore, the chief justice announced, the Constitution afforded slavery an ironclad protection. The seven-to-two majority decision of the Court not only rejected Scott’s claim to freedom but underscored the nature of slaves as property, granting that an owner could do with that property as he pleased.

Emboldened by the Supreme Court decision, southerners began to press for stricter enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required northerners to assist in returning runaway slaves to their southern owners. This act, a stronger version of a law originally passed in 1793, called for a one-thousand-dollar fine and six months’ incarceration for anyone aiding a slave to escape. The law was written broadly and interpreted the provision of food or shelter to a runaway as punishable offenses. In effect, the law demanded that the entire population of the country become a slave-catching militia.

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ºOnly the most minimal description was required of a slave for him to be identified and returned to slavery. One notable incidence of the effect of this law was a black man in Indiana who was returned to a Mississippi plantation nineteen years after he had escaped. •

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Not all northerners complied with the law. Some religious groups, such as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, had been opposed to slavery in the colonies for more than 150 years. ºThese were people who read their Bibles and believed that the example of Jesus was that all people were human and equal.• At first they organized protests, wrote tracts, and founded schools for free blacks. They took active roles in hiding runaway slaves on their way to Canada where U.S. laws could not reenslave them. As the numbers of antislavery activists grew, the movement spread into other religious groups and took on a broadly based name: abolitionist.

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Slave women were responsible for cooking both simple and elaborate meals for their owners, and their culinary efforts were often praised in contemporary accounts. Sarah Williams, a white New Yorker visiting the South in 1853, wrote home of the famous ‘barbecue’ of the South, that consisted of roasted pig which the slaves dressed with red pepper and vinegar. African traditions regarding the use of spices were brought to America by the first slaves to arrive and were passed on to future generations through oral recipes. In the slave quarters women adeptly used various peppers and herbs to make palatable dinners of animal parts snubbed by their masters, such as boiled pig intestines, or chitterlings.

The most vocal abolitionist of the time was William Lloyd Garrison, a Massachusetts publisher and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who believed the immediate emancipation of the slaves was a moral matter. Considered a radical even by northern standards, Garrison once publicly burned copies of the U.S. Constitution because it sanctioned slavery. On another occasion he walked out of a meeting with women abolitionists when chauvinist male abolitionists objected to the females’ taking on men’s work. On several occasions Garrison was beaten by northerners unsympathetic to his cause.

I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat, and I will be heard, Garrison said in 1831, the same year as the Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia. Some southerners, ignoring that slaves were forbidden to know how to read, feared that Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator, might inspire other blacks to rise up. They threatened to arrest him if he ever ventured south and placed a price on his head.

Although abolitionists remained a minority group, they continued to attract both black and white followers, including a runaway slave who would become the most famous black orator of his time. Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave from Maryland who was inspired to activism himself after attending one of Garrison’s lectures, held audiences spellbound with his command of the language. In 1842 he stood before an antislavery society and proclaimed: I appear this evening as a thief and robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them.

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Lucy Edwards served as a slave nurse, or mammy, to the children of her Virginia master. Her healthy and well-dressed appearance indicates the high status such bondswomen could obtain, for owners became dependent on them and trusted such nurses to raise and nurture their sons and daughters. My baby . . . is a great deal fonder of her Mammy than she is of me, white Louisianan Laura Tibbals confided to a relative. She nurses her and it would be a great trial to go without her. The formation of such powerful white-black bonds was one of the many ironies of the institution of slavery.

ºDouglass was extraordinarily important in persuading blacks and whites in the North to join the antislavery cause because he was a man who had himself been enslaved. He described firsthand what slavery was like to audiences that heretofore had heard only from white abolitionists who had no firsthand idea what life as a slave was like. •

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The abolitionists did more than make speeches. Some helped slaves to escape to the North through the so-called Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses and hiding places spread from the Deep South into the North. The railroad was run by conductors sympathetic to the cause of black freedom. ºRunaway slaves would travel at night and hide during the day in private homes, barns, secret cellars, churches, or wherever they could find someone to help them along the way. •

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Many Quakers took an active role in the Underground Railroad. Men such as Levi Coffin in North Carolina organized their neighbors and fellow church members. Coffin once stayed up all night serving whiskey to a man searching for his runaway slave. While the man was getting drunk, the fugitive slave was being escorted from Coffin’s house to another hiding place. When the hungover man awoke the next day, he felt so bad, he went back home, forgetting about the escaped slave.

Two Quaker boys from the same community spent much of their youth driving wagons of hay or firewood back and forth to Indiana, a distance of more than five hundred miles. It was a journey that could easily take a month or more. The wagon had a false bottom under which as many as eight runaway slaves could hide. The two boys began their missions of mercy when they were twelve.

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While their parents worked the fields, slave children were often left in the care of older women no longer capable of physically demanding tasks. Former slave Robert Shepherd remembered that a woman named Aunt Viney tuk keer of us . . . while dey mammies was at wuk in de fields. Aunt Viney would blow a horn to let her charges know dinner was ready, and at this sound, said Shepherd, the chillun come a-runnin from evvy which way [to] a great long trough what went plum ‘cross de yard, and dat was whar es et. Shepherd claimed that the infants had to eat with their hands the meals of vegetables and broth poured over crumbled corn bread.

The most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave from Maryland, who came to be known as Moses after leading so many people to freedom. ºShe went south at least nineteen times,• even into the coastal regions of South Carolina. ºLegend has it that she never allowed anyone to look back during an escape. If a runaway decided to turn back, Tubman would hold a gun to his head and make him continue. •

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How many slaves escaped through the Underground Railroad will never be known because the conductors and their allies rarely recorded anything in case they were questioned by local authorities. The best guess is that during thirty years, forty thousand escaped, or about 1 percent of the total held in bondage. Those who did escape between 1830 and 1860 helped to raise the northern consciousness about slavery when other freed slaves joined Douglass behind the speaker’s podium.

Yet it was not the issue of runaway slaves or religious abolitionists who polarized the issue of slavery for the North. Land and power did that. The question centered on what was going to happen with the new western territories that would one day become states. Would they enter the Union as free states or slave states? The answer to that question would dictate ºwho was going to control Congress, and by extension the country. Northerners wanted every new state to enter the Union free, but the South wanted each new state to be slave. •

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This 1859 Eastman Johnson painting, Negro Life at the South, or Old Kentucky Home, presents an idealized, bucolic view of slavery. Contented blacks relax to the tunes of a softly plucked banjo as the kind-faced white woman enters the yard at right to visit her folks. The scene was the backyard of Johnson’s father’s house in Washington, D.C., and the white woman at the right was Johnson’s sister Mary.

Battle lines were drawn around the Kansas Territory. Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed the issue to be decided by a vote of the settlers as to whether the new state would be free or slave. The act superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that forbade slavery in any state made from the Louisiana Purchase that was geographically north of Missouri’s southern border.

Since this bit of gerrymandering kept the southern regions of the western territories open to slavery and cotton growing, the cotton politicians did not object to Douglas’s proposal as long as there was a balance of power between slave and free states. That balance, however, was threatened by the debate over the admission of Kansas and Nebraska as states.

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A southern tobacco merchant used as a product label this scene taken directly from Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South, shown on page 19. The advertisement attempted to depict slavery as a gentle system to northern and foreign consumers, one that allowed slaves a measure of dignity and that produced contented darkies. Despite this economic propaganda, the illustration does allude to black contributions to American culture, for African-American James Bland wrote the song Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny, a popular hit in the nineteenth century.

Kansas became a battleground as settlers moved in and clustered in proslavery and antislavery towns. Bands of Missourians crossed into Kansas to intimidate the Free Soilers (as the antislavery party was known), raid abolitionist towns, and cast illegal ballots. Before long both the pro-and the antislavery sides sent in their own ruffians to swing the vote their way. They were not above shooting, stabbing, and beating each other to death to influence the outcome. Finally, on May 21, 1856, the Free Soil settlement of Lawrence was sacked by proslavers, and the nation first heard the name of John Brown.

Fifty-six-year-old Brown was an itinerant tanner who had been raised as an abolitionist by fanatically religious parents. He had failed at every business venture he tried because he was focused on one goal—the abolition of slavery. In 1855 he followed one of his sons to Kansas with a determination to wipe out proslavers wherever he found them.

When Brown was prevented from marching on Lawrence by the army’s occupation of the town, he returned to his camp at the Osawatomie settlement determined to strike a retaliatory blow. A short time later, when he heard that Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, the leading abolitionist voice in the Senate at the time, had been assaulted on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, Brown decided to avenge Lawrence and Sumner immediately.

On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown gathered his sons and a small group of followers and set out for the cabin of James Doyle, near Pottawatomie Creek. Doyle and his two sons had been active in the proslav-ery party. Brown’s men assaulted the cabin and dragged the three men outside. There, while the wives and children of their victims looked on in horror, Brown and his men hacked the three men to death with artillery broadswords.

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In August 1831 slave preacher Nat Turner led nearly eighty slaves on a bloodthirsty, disorganized rampage through Southhampton County, Virginia. Turner, who claimed he had been inspired by visions of heaven running with blood, and his band hacked to death about sixty whites—many of whom were women and children— before local militia quelled the rebellion. The aftermath of the revolt was also bloody. One hundred slaves were executed for complicity in the scheme, although most of those killed were innocent. Turner’s rebellion horrified white southerners and led to the implementation of additional laws governing slave conduct.

The Pottawatomie massacre triggered guerrilla warfare throughout Kansas, and Brown went into hiding and eventually left the area. ºThe Kansas Territory came to be known as Bleeding Kansas, and for four years the proslavers and antislavers fought it out.• Ultimately, Kansas was admitted as a free state, but only after five constitutions had been drafted and at least two hundred lives had been lost.

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Three years later Brown struck again. Having grown a white, Moses-like beard to disguise himself, he went to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 with the intention of starting a nationwide slave uprising. Brown’s attack on the town failed; his slave revolt never materialized. He was captured by a contingent of marines commanded by Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee and turned over to the state of Virginia for trial. Convicted of treason, Brown was sentenced to hang. As he was leaving the jail for the short ride to the gallows, he turned to one of his attendants and handed him the last words he wrote from his jail cell. They proved to be prophetic: I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without much bloodshed; it might be done.

As events unfolded, Brown predicted and played a leading role in bringing on the coming war. After his execution, North-South tensions were close to a breaking point. ºBrown had done things that could not be overlooked. Southerners might ignore the propaganda of the abolitionists, but the revolt that Brown tried to incite brought the two sections close to war.•

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In the North a new political party sprang up. The Republicans were dedicated to preventing slavery from expanding into the new territories, but the party and its presidential candidate in 1860 were careful not to oppose slavery in the South. That candidate was Lincoln, and he had been speaking out publicly against the spread of slavery for more than four years, including the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Yet Lincoln went to great pains to explain to his listeners that he was not an abolitionist.

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The slave of a U.S. Army surgeon, Dred Scott sued for his freedom after the death of his master, basing his case on the fact he had resided in areas where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 forbade slavery. By 1857 the case had reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In a shocking decision that exacerbated tensions between the North and South, the Supreme Court ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that blacks were not citizens and thus could not sue for their freedom. This precedent gave legal sanction for slaveholders to take their slaves anywhere in the United States. A sympathetic white family finally bought and emancipated Scott.

ºLincoln was not against slavery where it already existed; he was opposed to the expansion of slavery, which was the Republican Party’s